Donkey Games -- Game Sales Report¶

Business context¶

The aim of this report is to assist Donkey Games in deciding what their next game project should be. Many different factors will be taken into consideration, including platform as well as game genre.

Data¶

Data source and format¶

The data used has been sourced from VGChartz, a video game industry news website with a focus on console and game sales. Four different csv files will be used to complete the report.

Data quality and bias¶

The data contains records of game sales between the years 1970 and 2019, across many different platforms and game genres. There is a high number of missing values which will need to be addressed, and in terms of bias certain gaming platforms for example are more represented than others. Overall however, there is a lot of data available from which to extract potentially valuable insights.

Ethical considerations¶

The data does not contain anything that could be considered PII (potentially identifiable information). However, there are links to box art within the datasets, so copyright laws might be a valid concern.

Modelling¶

Methodology¶

After an initial data cleaning phase, the resulting joined dataset was used to create an explanatory multiple linear regression model. The aim was to attempt to explain which factors might impact a game's number of global sales. Multiple models were created iteratively, leading to different insights. The models created are available for review in individual notebooks, and the insights extracted are summarised below.

Insights¶

The main insights gained through modelling the data available to us are as follow:

  • European and North American sales are good indicators of global sales performance. If a game performs well in either of those markets, it is likely that it would perform well globally.
  • Critic scores are a good indicator of how well a game will perform globally. The higher the average critic score, the more copies the game is likely to sell. User scores on the other hand are less correlated to global sales.
  • The following game genres appear more likely to sell higher numbers of copies globally: action, action-adventure, MMO, RPG, sandbox, shooter.
  • Unfortunately the models did not lend themselves to determining which publishers or platforms were more likely to have high sales numbers. Perhaps more data sources could be used in the future to help with these predictors.

Although the process led to some valuable insights, there is room to build more robust models once more varied data is available.

Global overview across all platforms¶

This plot allows us to view the overall cumulative sales numbers for all game genres in our data.

In order to gain a better understanding, we can also look at the mean number of sales by game for each genre.

This plot confirms one of our modelling findings, games that perform well in terms of sales tend to be well reviewed.

Although some aspects of this bar plot are hard to interpret, it provides a visualisation of the scale of the video game industry. We also have confirmation of some of our modelling findings; shooters and action games appear to be quite popular in recent years.

Here we have plotted the global sales for the 10 best performing games in our data. As we can see, there is a wide spread of different genres, and 8 of the games were released on Nintendo systems. The issue for us is that Nintendo produce most of their own games in-house, so we will mostly be focusing on other platforms.

For the following sections of the report, we will focus on PC games, as well as the two major competing console platforms, Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One.

PC¶

Here we can see which game genres sell the most copies on PC.

This mean global sales plot, along with the previous plot, can help us narrow down the game genres to focus on.

Here we can see an indication of trends across five of the most popular PC game genres.

We can take a closer look at simulation games, and gain an understanding of which publishers it might be beneficial to work with based on their prior track record.

PlayStation 4¶

Following the same process as above with PC games, we can narrow PS4 titles down to action-adventure titles, which seem to be experiencing an upswing.

Xbox One¶

Lastly looking at Xbox One titles it seems that a racing game could be a good bet based on their consistent sales, or maybe an action-adventure title.

Implementation¶

Recommendations¶

Based upon this report the following recommendations can be made:

  • Select a gaming platform based not only on the insights uncovered, but also the team's strengths and prior experience
  • Consider whether to release the title exclusively on a single platform, or multi-platform release
  • Consider whether to use most of the budget on a single title, or multiple titles
  • Select a game genre based on the sales numbers and trends observed
  • Select a publisher based on their track record within the chosen game genre
  • Consider a limited pre-release or beta phase in a single market to predict global performance

Limitations¶

Additionally there are some limitations we need to be aware of. Our data does not contain any revenue figures, quarterly sales numbers, or game budgets.

Without any such figures it is hard to determine what type of game might ultimately result in the desired return on investment.

Thank you for reading!